Fog-Based Hierarchical Coordination of Residential Aggregators and Household Demand Response with Power Distribution Grids—Part I: Solution Design

The potential of Household Demand Response (HDR) to provide demand-side flexibility is significant. To harness this potential effectively, Residential Aggregators (RAs) collect the capabilities of a large number of residential loads through HDR. To ensure that the acceptable HDR potentials are unbiased, RAs must interact with Distribution System Operator (DSO) to comply with network constraints. This two-part paper establishes a hierarchical tri-level HDR-RAs-DSO distributed coordination framework using an efficient fog-based data transmission architecture. The first level involves householders optimizing their energy consumption driven by their comfort, while RAs maximize their profit considering the correlated uncertainties in the middle level. The distribution system's constraints are investigated and correction signals are prompted by DSO at the last level. Additionally, a new Full-Peer-to-Peer (F-P2P) market structure is designed for energy trade among RAs. The proposed coordination framework maintains privacy for all players, accounts for power loss fees, and considers the geographical distribution of householders. Part II of this paper series presents a new three-layer fog-based data transmission architecture for the coordination framework and develops models for required data transmission bandwidth and acceptable time delay in this architecture. The numerical results from various case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.